


Heart's Call

by StarWarsSyl



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: Aromantic Asexual Character, Attachment does not equal love in this fic, Atypical Family Units, Character-Driven Story, Gen, Jedi Culture Respected, Novel, light mystery
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-22
Updated: 2017-12-22
Packaged: 2019-02-18 11:34:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,743
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13099239
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StarWarsSyl/pseuds/StarWarsSyl
Summary: Akari Noko is a mother, an ex-cop, new to Coruscant, and has just given her daughter to the Jedi Order. Most stories continue with the Jedi child. This one is about the life that continues on when you're the one left behind.





	Heart's Call

 

Jedi Master Vanter Remec closed his eyes. When he opened them again, she was still standing there.

Not a bad dream, then.

“Miss Noko—”

“Akari.”  
Off to a spectacularly good start. “ _ Akari,  _ then. I can assure you that Asidinochi is safe, and I placed her with a Clan Mother I myself chose after spending time with your child. She is in the best of hands.”

Akari Noko’s bright dark eyes watched him close.

“So  _ why  _ would you do something as—”  _ stupid,  _ “—  _ drastic  _ as giving up your career? It was my understanding that you would have made Police Chief within ten years. They  _ wanted  _ you for the job.”  
“Sooner,” Akari confirmed.

Remec pinched the bridge of his nose against the building headache. “So explain to me again why you threw that success away to move to the planet where it is near-impossible to find even a  _ dead-end minimum-wage job _ ?”

“Because this is where I want to be.”

“I thought I made the system fairly  _ clear— _ ?”

Akari dismissed his rising concern with a hand wave. “It must be Asidinochi’s decision once she’s reached Knighthood. I’m not here for  _ her.  _ I’m here for  _ me. _ ”

“You’re here because your daughter is here,” Remec replied, voice grim.

Akari, all of her one-point-six meters braced with the confidence of a law enforcement officer, smiled. “This was a courtesy notification to you that I’m in town.”

“You won’t find anywhere to  _ live,  _ Akari.”

“I am determined, and I packed light.”

“You mean you left everything behind.”

“Not my heart,” Akari pointed out. “I’m doing what I need to do. Asidinochi is doing the same. So are you.” She gave him a courteous bow, one last smile, and turned to leave the Temple.

“Wait.”

Akari glanced back, one dark eyebrow arching.

“There  _ is  _ an opening I’m aware of. It’s a low-level security job— a night watchman in an apartment building. The owner is transitioning from droids to personnel, and has both jobs  _ and  _ living quarters available.”

A little gleam of a smile tugged at Akari’s lip. “Just give me the address, and I’ll be on my way.”  
“It’s in the Friends District, which can be difficult to get into these days. It’s also close by.”  
“Ah.” Akari’s smile widened. “I thought you didn’t want me near the Temple?”  
Remec felt a little pull in the Force that made him wonder just what he’d signed up for when he’d answered the request from Jannaria to come test a baby. “I don’t want you losing everything because of one understandable, but _ poor  _ decision.”

Akari actually chuckled. “Well, then. Lead the way, Master Jedi.”  
_ Please don’t let me regret this _ , he inwardly groaned.

 

* * *

 

Akari stepped foot in her new home, palming the lights and looking around. The door opened into one large room, a solitary couch to the right, and a dining table to the left. Deeper into the room across from the table, a counter tried to make the kitchen a separate area.

Akari let her two overstuffed bags slide from her back to the floor, and explored deeper. Several steps straight from the door brought her into a tiny hallway.

A door on the right for a pantry, a door farther in and also to the right, the refresher.

On the left, two bedrooms, one slightly larger than the other.

_ And that’s that.  _

It was far larger and nicer than Akari had expected. Vanter Remec might see her as the small-world bumbling cop dropped into the sea of Coruscant, but Akari’s expectations, so far, had been largely accurate.

Except for this very decent apartment, and a  _ job  _ on the first day of her pilgrimage.

_ Are you looking out for me, Force of my daughter? _

She glanced at her chrono, saw she had a good six hours standard before needing to report in for her first shift.

_ Better get some sleep in, then. _

Pulling the emergency blanket from her pack, Akari chose the bedroom closest to the kitchen, wrapped the blanket around herself and lay down on the mattress.

 

* * *

 

She’d managed to capture three hours of sleep before a knock at the door had her crawling out of her blanket.

The door slid open to reveal an elderly couple on her doorstep.

The taller of the two women beamed, holding out a tray covered with a preservation lid and announced, “Welcome to the neighborhood.”  
Akari accepted the tray with a surprised smile. “Thank you. Won’t you come in? I apparently have a couch.”

“That’s alright, Dear,” the shorter woman assured her. “We don’t want to interrupt your unpacking.”  
Akari chuckled, glancing back at her two bags.

“We just wanted to introduce ourselves. My name is Haven Keen,” She-of-the-Lesser-Height announced, “and this is my wife, Tress.”  
“It’s nice to meet you,” Akari replied, balancing the tray on one palm so she could grip hands with them both. “I’m Akari Noko. Apparently the new night guard, unless something goes very wrong this evening.”

Haven smiled. “We’re glad you’re here. If you turn right when you leave your apartment, we’re three doors down. There’s going to be a bit of a get-together in the park in a couple hours, and Tress thought we should make sure you know you’re invited.”  
“That’s very thoughtful of you, but I think I have too much on my plate this evening. Sorry.”

“Of course, Dear,” Haven replied. “We’ll see you around. Hope your first evening goes well!”

As Akari shut the door after them, she found herself smiling.

_ Well, they were nice. _ She lifted the corner of the preservation lid and caught a whiff of warm, home-made cookies.  _ Oh.  _ Very  _ nice,  _ she amended.

She deposited the tray on the counter, stole one of the cookies to munch on as she dug through her packs, and set about readying for her new job.

 

* * *

 

“...and the monitors  _ there.  _ Was the apartment satisfactory?”

Akari gave a nod. “Yes, thank you.”

Her boss was a well-sculpted human with blue eyes, a short crop of thick blond hair, a tan that to Akari’s eyes looked too precise to be real, and stood easily a head taller than his new employee.

“Your timing was fortuitous,” he assured her in his Coruscanti accent. “These buildings have been guarded by droids for  _ years.  _ Generations, even. Both my father  _ and  _ my grandfather swore by them.”

Akari swept her gaze around the small control room, noted the displays revealing the current status of each turbolift, and the distinct lack of video footage  _ anywhere.  _ “There appear to be no security cams in the lifts or on this level?”

“This is a quiet neighborhood,” Ormun Krale dismissed. “It has been for several hundred years or more. We have cams on all the doors that lead out of the building, and at the first level for the lifts, but it just wasn’t economical to fit  _ all  _ of the lift junctions with them. We had a patrol droid for each level, and now that I can’t trust  _ them,  _ I need something alive prowling in their place.”

Akari eyed him. “Mind if I ask what happened?”

“Ended up hacked,” the man grumbled.

“An entire floor is massive,” Akari pointed out. “A lot could happen while I was on patrol without me ever knowing.”

“Just keep the link I gave you turned on. Everybody here knows the frequency to call if they need assistance. You’re here simply to reassure everybody. This isn’t exactly a high-risk area. You’ll be fine.”

“If that’s the way you want this played.”

 

* * *

 

As Akari finished the first circle of her floor, she decided that night watch duty didn’t feel  _ that  _ much different from police work, after all.

_Though it’s been a good long while since I was a beat cop._

_At least I’m not leaving tickets on parked speeders._

The thought made her smile as she checked in with the screens in the control room, then started her circle again.

She encountered a few people coming in, even fewer leaving. She offered each a friendly nod without pausing to chat.

Akari didn’t know if things ran similarly here or not, but back on Jannaria, if you gave a simple greeting, it could be seized and stretched into an hour-long gossip session.

Around twenty-three hundred hours, she turned a corner to find a young woman standing in the hallway staring at an open door.

“Everything alright?” Akari asked.

Wide dark eyes turned to hers, but some of the panic in them faded as they recognized the uniform Akari had found on her new refresher counter. “You’re the new security guard? I think my apartment’s been broken into!”

Akari pulled her service blaster from the holster hidden beneath her jacket. “Stand back, Miss. Wait until I’ve cleared it before you enter.”  
Biting her lip, the girl— barely out of her teens, Akari thought— nodded and waited as Akari checked her blaster was still on stun and stepped through the door.

Two quick eye movements, then striding to the hall, checking closet and the rooms already familiar because they held the exact same shape as her own—

“All clear,” she called.

She returned to the main living space to find the occupant racing for a small hutch by the living room’s side of the kitchen counter. “Please, please, please,” she muttered, fingers shaking as she dragged open the door and then reached  _ up  _ to the ceiling of the hutch and scrabbled—

Her expression sagged in relief as her hands returned with a small data chip.

But— just to be sure— she turned to the round dining table and slid the chip into a datareader.

“We’re alright,” she breathed at last, sending a blinding smile up to Akari as she pushed her square glasses up her nose. “It’s all here.”

Akari eyed the room. “Is anything else missing?”

“What? Oh. I’ll look, but I don’t really have anything worth taking. Except my work. I’m an author— well, not yet, but I hope to be. It’s not like my stories are valuable, but I still have this ridiculous terror of them being  _ stolen. _ ” The girl chuckled, running a hand over her tight black braids. “Whew. Okay.” She pushed away from the table and moved from room to room, taking a cursorial glance at everything. “Seems fine. I don’t see anything out of place.”  
“I have to ask the thing that always ends up sounding insulting,” Akari warned.

Confused eyes turned to her, and then the dark-toned face lit with a beaming smile. “Oh. Did I forget I left the door open?”

“Yes. That unfortunate question.”

“It’s alright.” Slightly taller than Akari, she shook her head. “I always double check my door.”

“I’m going to check the surrounding doors to see if any have been tampered with. While I do that, try to think of anyone who might want to break in, if the purpose was not to steal valuables.”

“A personal reason?” She nodded. “I’ll do that. I’m Melia Ardson, by the way.”

“Noko. Akari Noko.” Akari stepped back into the hallway and inspected the door pad.

The key card slot looked just a little bent.  _ Forced, alright.  _ Checking the other units by the doors surrounding Melia’s, Akari found nothing tampered with.

She returned to the apartment and shook her head when Melia looked up from where she sat at the table. “Yours is the only one. They definitely forced the lock, so they didn’t have a key.”

“My first thought was that maybe someone from the University wanted to steal my story and just couldn’t find it, but I can’t think of anyone who cares. I’m not actually published yet, after all. And it’s just a little novel.”

“Without security cams on this level, there’s little more I can do.” Akari felt a sliver of annoyance at that.  _ Wonder if I can make that change.  _ “Would you like to file a report?”

Melia nodded, slipping the chip out of the reader and into her pants pocket. “It’d be good to have it on record, just in case it happens again or to someone else. The pesky  _ why didn’t you report that first time? _ ”

“For someone without reason to be burgled, you seem to expect a repeat.”

“I write detective novels. It comes with the territory, I’m afraid,” was Melia’s cheerful reply as she followed Akari out of the apartment, then locked the door and checked its seal.

Akari arched her eyebrows at Melia as they walked down the quiet hall toward Akari’s new office. “Enjoy mysteries, do you?”

“Very much. We’ll see if I can write one worth reading, though. Do you enjoy the genre?”

“I’m rather picky about it, but it’s alright.”

“Oh?” Melia smiled again. She seemed quick to smile, and Akari liked it. “How so?”

“I prefer a plot without romance— something surprisingly difficult to find, and—”

“I  _ know _ !” Melia chuckled. “I am aromantic, personally, and it does get a little tiresome to have romance in  _ every single story. _ I don’t write it, partly because I would simply be guessing as to how any of that feels based on things  _ I’ve _ read or watched, and largely because I simply don’t care to.”

_ Ah. Someone who understands. _ Jannaria had a strong romance culture, and the fact that Akari spent their many lover-focused holidays “alone” had always made her neighbors feel sorry for her, even if Akari had tried to explain she felt quite comfortable.

“But I interrupted you. What was the second thing?”

Akari turned the corner, leading them into the small security cubby. “I don’t much care for the inaccuracies. Certain ideas float around in script-writers’ and authors’ heads that make no sense from an actual police standpoint. It pulls me out of the stories.”

“That might be a problem, then. I don’t actually know any detectives.”

Akari snagged a datapad from under the counter and pulled up the proper form. It might have been a slightly different format than those on Jannaria, but it contained the same basic points. “I never covered anything particularly mind-blowing, but I was a cop, before. Here. Fill this out, and sign there.”  
Melia fell silent as she read over the form, then pulled out a small journal of flimsi and scribbled notes in it. “Sorry,” she murmured, squinting through the silver frames of her glasses, “I’ve never seen one of these before. Research.”  
Akari swallowed a chuckle and sat at the desk, checking the screens. All the turbolifts seemed alright, none of them moving at the moment. _ Yes. We should have cams at  _ least  _ in the lifts. _

“Done,” Melia announced, sliding the datapad back to Akari to check over. It matched the requirements, so Akari confirmed it and submitted it, suspecting it was one of millions to swamp the Coruscant police force. 

“Because we have so few details and nothing was missing, I doubt you will ever end up with a followup,” Akari warned.

Melia shrugged. “I got some experience out of the whole thing. I now know what it feels like to come home and find your door wide open.”

“Do you look at all experiences so pragmatically?” Akari asked, amused.

Melia shrugged. “It’s hard not to see my life through the lense of planning to write as soon as I have a few free minutes. Most of the things I write about I’ve never experienced, so I have to cultivate my imagination whenever possible.”

“If you have any specific questions about policework or life, I’d be willing to answer a few sometime.”  _ I wouldn’t mind spending some time with you. _

Again, the blinding smile. “Thank you. I’ll keep that in mind. Right now, I really need to get back so I can sleep. There’s an exam tomorrow.”  
“Best of luck with that.” Akari stood to make another sweep, planning to circle the floor in the opposite direction as last time.

Melia chuckled. “May the Force be with me, and all that. Have a good evening!”

“You too.”

Akari continued her shift, nothing particularly interesting happening, and then she returned at 0500 to her own little home, ready for dinner and sleep.

From past experience, she knew it shouldn’t take too long for her body to become basically nocturnal, but it wouldn’t appreciate the change.  _ We’ll pamper it until it adjusts,  _ she planned, drawing a nice hot bath while she rummaged food from her bag and two of the gifted cookies _ . _

When she woke up later, she’d need to locate some sort of market. Until then?

Satisfied appreciation of her new neighbors’ cooking skills.

 

 

 


End file.
